We've Prayed for Times Like This for Homegrown Cubs Pitching (and Yet...)

[RandallPnkFloyd]

Let's forget the rough results recently--especially since they're mostly the offense's fault. When was the last time it was this much fun to watch the Cubs pitch, from a pure stuff and domination potential perspective?

Image courtesy of © Jeff Hanisch-USA TODAY Sports

For as long as I can remember – at least the last handful of years – I’ve had to go outside of the Chicago Cubs organization if I wanted to watch an exciting pitching performance. Whether it’s a stuff-based starter or a fireballing reliever, genuine excitement was to be found somewhere within the 29 other teams in Major League Baseball.

That’s not to say that the Cubs haven’t had good pitchers in the last handful of seasons. They certainly have. Jake Arrieta wasn’t all that long ago, after all. Neither was prime Kyle Hendricks. Jon Lester and Pedro Strop provided some of my fondest memories in shorter-term Cubs history. And there have been interesting ones, too. Rowan Wick looked like a dude at some point. I enjoyed Scott Effross a lot.

But there’s a certain watchability factor that Cubs pitchers have lacked in the last several years, even amid a solid collection of arms. The velo. The stuff. While the Cubs' overhauling their pitching infrastructure made such an outlook possible, we’d yet to see the fruits of that labor prior to 2024.

Which is part of what made Ben Brown’s Tuesday start so special. It wasn’t only that he held the Milwaukee Brewers hitless across seven innings, mixing the fastball & curve to absolutely delightful effect. It was that the type of raw stuff he flashed – and has shown us all year – is something we’d typically have to seek elsewhere. A Brewers starter. Or a Dodgers starter. Or a Tampa Bay reliever. The tides are shifting, to a point where we don’t have to seek outside means in order to see special stuff.

It doesn’t end with Brown. Shota Imanaga’s blend of upper-zone fastball against his splitter. Hayden Wesneski’s sweeper. The velocity of a Daniel Palencia or (now) Porter Hodge. Results notwithstanding in recent weeks, the watchability has risen when we’re watching the Cubs on the bump.

Of course, there are more on the way. Cade Horton. Michael Arias. Brandon Birdsell. There are exciting arms in this system that offer far more of this type of energy than we’ve seen from inside the organization since the halcyon days of Kyle Farnsworth, Juan Cruz, Mark Prior, and Carlos Zambrano. That's to say nothing of the quality that you’re getting from Javier Assad and others who belong more to the previous era's outs-over-oohs-and-aahs ethos. But this isn’t about organizational quality. This is about the completely unquantifiable organizational excitement.

You obviously want quality on the hill. But at some point, you also want flash. You want velocity and movement. Sure, there might be a bit more erraticism that presents itself as a result, – it’ll surely lead to some subsequent frustration when you’ve got a walk in a key moment – but you’re less liable to care, over an extended period, when your eyeballs are busy feasting on the physics-defying intensity of your own team's offerings.

In the broader team context, it’s a small thing. It certainly doesn’t completely compensate for the struggles we’ve seen out of the collective roster over the past few weeks. But there is solace to be offered here, at the very least. Whether it’s Brown or Imanaga or Hodge, there’s at least a certain relief in acknowledging that the Cubs have finally done it.

They’ve set themselves up such that, perhaps, it’ll soon be fans of other teams finding themselves tuning into the Cubs’ barrage of exciting arms for a change.

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[CubinNY]

The last time? 

Wood, Z, Prior, Clement,